Quick’n’Dirty Episode 45: Talkin’ BSides

Hmmm… seems like it’s been several weeks since I’ve had to do a recap of the Quick’n’Dirty podcast show. That’s both a good thing (one more hour back in my busy schedule) and a bad thing (it’s nice having ready made content to serve up to the 2-3 people that read this blog). At the very least, it’s good to have a little distraction from the exciting/amazing/all consuming conversation that’s been going on in my last post about location-based services. But I digress…

This week my co-host, Jennifer Leggio, and I had every intention of sticking to our regular Q’n’D format of social application of the week, featured guest, Twitter-o-the-week and then our trademark point/counterpoint. A compelling guest and a little technology glitch conspired against us so we had to punt on our P/CP. Don’t worry though, it will be back next week — we promise.

Jennifer got things kicked off with our social app of the week which was none other than Hot Potato [h/t to Damien Basile for the suggestion]. While Jennifer was skeptical at first about the need for yet another location-based service, we both agreed that Hot Potato’s functionality might actually meet a need in the marketplace. Mainly geared toward physical events (hello conferences), Hot Potato allows attendees to overlay a virtual conversation — which unlike Twitter, can be confined to a small group of friends or anyone at the conference. That’s not a knock on Twitter but I’ve been told more than once that some of my conference tweets aren’t always appreciated by those that aren’t in attendance.

Next up was our guest of the week, Michael “BSides” Dahn. Inconveniently, our switchboard dropped Michael midway through our interview so we didn’t get to dig in too much in part one of our interview. Fortunately, Michael was able to come back in after our “Twitter-o-the-week” and due to the richness of the conversation, Jennifer and I made the back channel decision to skip our point/counterpoint. Anyway, here’s the scoop on Security BSides:

“Each BSides is a community-driven event built for and by information security community members. The goal is to expand the spectrum of conversation beyond the traditional confines of space and time. It creates opportunities for individuals to both present and participate in an intimate atmosphere that encourages collaboration. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. It is where conversations for the next-big-thing are happening. We’ve loosely based the concept on the BarCamp format… because it works.”

So what impressed me most about Michael/BSides were these three things:

Jennifer is a huge fan. Because I trust Jennifer’s instincts implicitly, I am a huge fan (through transitive property of course).

Michael and his team have created their BSides event quite organically. Given the fact that word on the street is that BSides “outshined” RSA at the recent RSA Conference, this speaks volumes about their level of commitment and creativity.

Michael’s “tweetable” thought was hands down our most pithy. He kept his words of wisdom to one word, “participate.” Nice!

At the risk of tooting our own horn, Jennifer also announced that we were making a $500 donation to support the Security BSides Las Vegas event (you can do so too if you like on BSides sponsorship page).

Last but not least was our “Twitter-o-the-week.” Our choix de la semaine was the lovely, smart and elegant Yuli Ziv . According to her bio, Yuli is an entrepreneur, futurist, blogger, founder of Style Coalition and My It Things, organizer of Fashion 2.0 meetups. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Juli in person and listening to her speak at the 140 Conference in NYC last year. What I can tell you is that she is as good via Twitter as she is in person. If you don’t follow her yet, you absolutely should. And to that end (Jennifer, this will make you happy), “Yuli, we love your tweets.”